Family Cauldron
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: She was the lucky one because her Miyoko had actually tried to be a mother with her. Except she didn't feel lucky at all.


A/N: For the Green Room 2015 (Rlt), challenge #8 - the Silence challenge, and for the WIXOSS non-flash Bingo, #155 - belonging.

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Family Cauldron

It began long before her mother decided she didn't want her. It began long before her father abandoned her and her mother - and could he even be called a father, she wondered? He'd never done a fatherly thing for her except conceive her. As far as she knew, there wasn't even a legal record of their relationship, and there would never be unless a paternity test was taken. And she had no cause for that. She was fine with her grandmother, and if that ever failed, there was a brother in much the same circumstance as her.

He was her half-brother, really. Same mother, different father - and their mother had packaged the both of them off to their grandmother. In a way, she was the lucky one. She'd at least had some years with her mother before things changed. And her step-father. She was the lucky one because her Miyoko had actually tried to be a mother with her. Ayumu had gone to their grandmother as soon as he was out of the hospital. He didn't know her at all.

But Ruko didn't think herself lucky at all. It wasn't a fairy-tale family, a happy family, and not all of it had to do with the messy kids situation. Maybe none of it had anything to do with that. Ruko didn't see the connections, anyway. It wasn't Ayumu's fault he'd been born in a one night stand when their mother was just barely a legal adult. It wasn't Ruko's fault she was born in the same wa, and just when a more steady relationship was beginning to bloom with a completely unrelated man.

Maybe she did have to credit her stepfather. He'd stuck around, at least. He'd played his role in her parenting, providing the money: the financial support, and trying to give a bit more as well. Ruko supposed she could have gotten along with him if she was more open. If she was the sort who'd rather run about the house or outside instead of shut herself in her room, the sort who'd rather glare at her companions instead of joke about and laugh with them, the type who'd try and win a game instead of trying to use it to connect with her opponent.

Which was why the WXOSS game was so perfect for her. Every girl was out for their wish. The opponent didn't matter. Couldn't matter.

Of course, she wound up forming one of the late exceptions to that rule, but that was a whole other story. And that exception had a reason as well. Unrelated to this.

Or maybe it had everything to do with her family situation.

Ayumu grew up without his mother's influence and Hatsu, wherever she'd gone wrong with her own daughter (if indeed she had at all, because if the sin of the child wasn't the sin of the parent, then it had to work the other way as well), raised him to be open and loving and what a typical boy his age should be like. Granted, he got into less trouble than most and was a little quieter and didn't like to talk about his parents and gave his little sister more good qualities the actually possessed (and who could blame him, when they barely met face to face and she was more of a baby cousin or niece than a baby daughter). But if his mother had been looking for a kid that went by the book, he would've been much closer. But she hadn't even tried to be a mother to him, and that hurt was buried somewhere under the complete upbringing. At least she tried with Ruko.

Or, rather, that was good little Ruko should have convinced herself of but good little Ruko wasn't good or little or a particularly forgiving person. Because she got to witness all her mother's faults growing up, and vice versa. She got to cause trouble because her mother couldn't grasp parenting and her own child – somehow lacked that certain maternal instinct that led a mother to understand their child without a word passed between them – and thus led to a viscous cycle. Because the lack of understanding led to many things: led to neglect and overbearingness when it wasn't appropriate and mixtures of the two that were all wrong for the wrong reasons… Began with simple things like trying to put her to bed when she was hungry, and feeding her when her nappies were soiled, but of course all those incidents took place before the age of three and so she didn't remember them. They were on the medical records though: rashes and what not as a result, and a few visits from social services as well. And she remembered the later visits from social services. The stuff that made sure she was being fed properly and not over-punished for anything…

But that was one that had never been much of a problem. She got slapped occasionally, but it was more like how one girl friend would hit another, than anything else. Not how a mother would physically punish a child. Punishments were – well, she didn't get many of them on the whole. And that wasn't something that social services could say anything about. It was the nappy rashes and a few bouts of malnutrition that had done it, but once her mother was finally married and she got a bit older and was eating normal foods, it no longer mattered. And the nappies were a non-issue by then too. Her mother was getting more responsible too. Or maybe it was because needs were more obvious when they weren't proceeded by crying but by actual words, and maybe if Ruko had been one of those naturally open people, they could have made it work.

Except she wasn't one of those people. She was a closet girl and she didn't make it easy for anyone, her mother included, to understand her. Some of it was by purpose, because a mother should really do better, be better. Any parent should be, and her real father had already skipped the possibility, and probably didn't have a clue he was doing so.

Part of it also was that Ruko, like many children, was under the impression that parents should be perfect. Except she was the subset that understood her own parents weren't. So it was a matter of her parents failing to reach the expectations she had of them, failing to reach the bar, so to speak. She shouldn't have to explain herself to her mother. Her mother should understand her without all that. Words were for the people who would never understand: the strangers, the billions other people in the world – but not the mother who'd borne her.

Ruko was never sure why she thought like that, but she did. And it didn't change, even after she'd despaired of her mother ever understanding herself that way. And she never thought what her mother might think, on the other side of it all. Her mother who was trying but so clumsy in her tries that it seemed, from the daughter's end, to do more harm than good. She hadn't thought of the barriers she was putting up, the perspective she was affecting, until one day her mother broke down in tears and called her frightening. Frightening.

A frightening unknown. Like a stranger, only worse because this stranger had lived under the same roof for fourteen years, barring camps and things like that, things to get Ruko out of her shell except it never happened that way. Never worked that way. And then her mother gave up and Kominato Hatsu suddenly had two grandchildren under her wing.

And Kominato Hatsu fit the model of what a parent should be like very snugly.

So Ruko was sent to live with her, and her half-brother who was busy with college and working and all that by then and was barely in the little apartment anyway, but still doted on her like the kid he got to spoil. Fit snugly into the uncle mode…though maybe not a father. He'd spoil the child too much, unless it was offset by a wife, because if brotherhood didn't stop the spoiling, she doubted fatherhood would.

She appreciated it, she did, but the truth was Ayumu understood her about as well as her mother did. Maybe less, because he had a few disadvantages working for him: the time gap, the distance gap, the fact that they didn't have contact for very long growing up and by the time Ruko came to live under the same roof as him, he was swept away into adulthood and had a slightly different sort of image than reality set in his mind. But that was okay because it wasn't that she disliked the books he'd pick out for her. She read them more than once. And she appreciated the effort with the games…even if she did wind up playing them with herself most of the time. But it was fun. She grew out of checkers eventually but she still played chess with herself on occasion – even after Ayumu did the impossible that their mother had never managed (and there was a bit of the Hatsu charm thrown in, along with the uniqueness of the WIXOSS game that Ayumu would never know). There was a certain charm to it. So maybe Ayumu did know her fairly well after all. Or maybe he just had a good intuition for gifts or something of the sort.

Still, it only spoke more for her mother's failure. If Ayumu who was hardly ever there could give her gifts she could use, how could her mother not understand her at all? Her presents were clothes in the newest fashion she never wore, romance books she never read, makeup she never used. She wore the barrettes occasionally, but they were the flimsy kind that snapped too quickly and sometimes she wondered why she bothered.

It took being away from it all…or maybe it took the WIXOSS game and Tama and Yuki and Ulith and Mayu…or maybe it took neither of those but friends, the friends she finally made thanks to WIXOSS and the Selector battles. Either way, it took something else to make her realise she was being too harsh, that there was something scary in her that didn't have to do with not understanding someone else – because she and Yuzuki had understood each other very well by the point she said that to her, by the time she unintentionally mirrored Miyoko's words.

Whatever had done the teaching, it had taught her that nothing was perfect, that nothing should be perfect and that maybe, maybe, she'd been too harsh to her mother and maybe, maybe, she could have tried a little harder herself, being more open, less reserved, less harsh and cold and self-driven even when she had nothing to be so self-driven for.


End file.
